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Wednesday, February 1, 2012

1 February - Noted Articles

In 1992, as his father, President George H.W. Bush, ran for reelection, Jeb Bush denied having reached out to HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler on Recarey's behalf, a denial he maintains through a spokeswoman to this day. Bush said that he only spoke to a lower-level HHS official to ask that Recarey be given a "fair hearing" with regard to his application to renew a waiver that allowed IMC to receive more than 50 percent of its revenue from Medicare. (The waiver had been granted as part of an HMO pilot project that was set to expire. The renewal was ultimately not granted.)
But now former Secretary Heckler herself, in an interview with HuffPost, has confirmed that Jeb Bush lobbied her, that she was in favor of renewing the waiver (although she left office before doing so) and that his input played a major role in her thinking.
Heckler's statement backs up congressional testimony offered by two other HHS officials in 1987. If all three are to be believed, Bush has been lying for some 20 years. He did, in fact, directly lobby the secretary for the IMC waiver.
The same year that the HHS officials testified, Recarey, who regularly bragged of his connections to the Miami Cuban mafia, was indicted for defrauding Medicare, among other charges. He fled the country, first to Venezuela, then to Spain, where he fended off an extradition effort. It is alleged that he and IMC stole hundreds of millions of dollars overall. The IMC Medicare fraud is one of the largest in the program's history.

The bills were crafted with the help of the Goldwater Institute, a powerful conservative think tank in Phoenix that flew Walker to the state for an event in November. Nick Dranias, director of the institute’s Center for Constitutional Government, told TPM he sees Walker as a “hero” but that Wisconsin’s laws were “modest” compared to Arizona’s measures.

Beyond a ban on collective bargaining, the bills would also prohibit state and local government workers from deducting money from their paychecks to pay union dues.
They would ban state and local governments from paying anyone to spend time doing union work, a practice known as “release time.”
And in another break from the Wisconsin model, the restrictions would affect every type of public union, including police and firefighters.

Panetta's explanation of why he believes killing an American citizen without due process is legal wasn't exactly comforting.

President Obama just signed a bill that, if not for its many administrative loopholes, would "mandate" military detention for non-citizen terror suspects apprehended on American soil, so it's not accurate for Panetta to state that "any" suspected terrorist apprehended by the US receives due process. The vast majority of the nearly two hundred detainees at Gitmo have never been charged with anything, let alone tried and convicted. Osama bin Laden was the admitted leader of a group engaged in an armed conflict against US troops in Afghanistan; concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was more than a font for extremist propaganda has never been aired.

( Except the question is really `Do people who shoot back when the U.S. invades their country have any rights` mixed with another spinmeister`s favourite : seeing as how Clinton herself said that Àl Qaeda` was a fabrication. )

Thirty years of prison expansion has spawned an ethical and budgetary crisis that Webb wants to examine with a federal, bi-partisan commission that would recommend reforms to Congress. ”This has been the most expensive experiment in the United States, and the most inhumane in some ways,” said Jennifer Stitt, director of legislative affairs for Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “It’s getting to a breaking point.”

abc.net.au - Brand new houses and newly clad buildings sit next to empty shells of buildings and homes that still have tarps for roofs. The emotional recovery of these communities too is far from over, with com...

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